Books for Children and Young Adults

Which Side Are You On? The Story of a Song

This wonderful childrens’ book tells the story of a song written in 1931 that has become an anthem for people fighting for their rights all over the world. Florence Reece’s husband Sam, a coal miner in Kentucky, was helping organize a union when all hell broke loose. The company and its hired thugs started attacking miners and their homes, including Reece’s. While bullets flew around her and the couple’s seven children and they took cover under their bed, Florence took out her pencil and started writing – and the song was born. 40 pages hardcover

Joe Van der Katt and the Great Picket Fence

In this delightful children’s book, in the town of Litterbox in New York’s Catskill Mountains, J. Paul Kitty and the other fat cats have all the money and power until the poor cats get organized and demand fair pay and better working conditions. The employees at Cat’s Cradle Company eventually triumph when, led by fellow cats Joe Wobbly and Gompers, they build a picket fence for the owner but don’t make a gate. 32 pages hardcover

Bye, America

Young Brady is proud of his dad and wants to be just like him, working at the factory and making useful things. But that dream dies when his dad goes to work one day and is told that the factory is closing and the work is being sent to China. 22 pages paperback

Kids Library: Mother Jones, Triangle Fire, Cesar Chavez

We’ve collected this special set of attractive and kid-friendly books to help today’s youngsters understand the historic struggle of working people for justice and dignity. Each book explains an historic figure or history-altering incident in easy-to-understand language. All are generously illustrated to hold a young person’s attention. 32 pages each paperback

Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor

Your heart will be broken by this exceptional book’s photographs of children at backbreaking, often life-threatening work, and the accompanying commentary by author Russell Freedman. Photographer Lewis Hine – who himself died in poverty in 1940 – did as much, and perhaps more, than any social critic in the early part of the 20th century to expose the abuse of children, as young as three and four, by American capitalism. 104 pages paperback

Fire in the Hole!

Fourteen-year-old Mick doesn’t want to end up like his father, a rough-hewn miner working for low wages in the Coeur d’Alene silver-mining district of Idaho. He doesn’t like the militant, often confrontational approach of his father’s union as the men struggle against an uncaring mine owner and would rather do his fighting with words like his mentor, Mr. Delaney, who runs the town newspaper. 170 pages hardcover

The Worst Children’s Jobs in History

The next time your children complain about having to help with the dishes or mow the lawn, put this book in front of them. 104 pages paperback

Kids on Strike!

This is a fascinating and amazing book. Kids on Strike! tells the story of children who stood up for their rights against powerful company owners. Nearly two million children were in the U.S. workforce by the early 1900s. 208 pages hardcover

Harvesting Hope: The story of Cesar Chavez

This is a carefully written and beautifully illustrated story of the life of United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, aimed at children 6 to 9. 48 pages hardcover
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Martin Luther King, Jr., and the March on Washington

Written for 5 to 8 year-olds, this is a very nice introduction to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, that watershed event in the fight for civil rights. It uses the March as a point of reference as it talks about segregation in America and the battle for equal rights. 48 pages Paperback

Farmworker’s Friend: The story of Cesar Chavez

A thoughtful and moving book about the inspiring life of American hero Cesar Chavez, founder and long-time leader of the United Farm Workers of America. This sympathetic portrayal of Chavez and his life’s work begins with his childhood, starting from the time his family’s store in Arizona failed during the Great Depression and his entire family was forced into the fields to harvest vegetables for a few cents an hour. 80 pages paperback

Our Community of Workers Coloring Book

Not all childrens’ coloring books have to be about rabbits and raccoons. This one is about moms and dads at work -- in offices, on construction sites, in factories and warehouses and the Post Office and the hospital and on and on. 32 pages paperback
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Lyddie

Lyddie Worthen is a 13-year-old farm girl who takes a job in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, when hard times hit her family. Six days a week from dawn to dusk she and the other girls run weaving looms in the murky dust-and lint-filled factory. Lyddie learns to read—and to handle the menacing overseer. 182 pages paperback

Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type

A delightful children’s book (ages 3 to 7) with a union message! It seems that Farmer Brown has a problem. All day long he hears click, clack, moo... click, clack, moo, coming from the cow barn. What’s all this about? He gets the answer when the cows send a note to the farmhouse. They’re cold, they say. No milk, they say, until they get electric blankets. 32 pages hard cover

The Night Worker

This is a wonderful book for families to read together as a beginning for discussions about just what it is that parents do when they go to work every day. Written for children ages two through six, The Night Worker tells of Alex, whose Papa one night presents him with his very own hard hat and takes him to the construction site where Papa works as an engineer. 40 pages hardcover

Breaker: A Boy’s Story of the 1902 Pennsylvania Coal Strike

Breaker is the story of the 1902 Pennsylvania coal miners’ strike seen through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Pat McFarlane. Pat lives in Scatter Patch, a small town of immigrants and poor, working-class citizens ruled by the anthracite mine and run by a rich and aloof boss. ("They don’t suffer," said mine owner George Baer during the 1902 strike. "They don’t even speak English." Real quote, not fiction!) When his father is killed in a massive cave-in, Pat must go to work as a breaker boy. Under terrible and dangerous conditions, he and the other boys spend their days picking slate out of streams of coal. 200 pages paperback